From Russia With Love

I was having a complicated dream this morning about K and her mother bailing me out of jail, and her mother had gotten a perm, which I must say was an interesting choice, but it actually looked rather nice. At any rate, some part of the dream involved me needing to read something on the radio, and I kept flubbing it and the technician, who appeared to be Sylvester Stallone, was looking rather frustrated. He kept ringing a bell.

Which, I realized after a moment, was actually someone ringing our doorbell.

No, I am by no means slothful, but I do sleep until ten or so, usually. The fact that I was still asleep suggested that it was earlier than ten, and I wondered who could be ringing the door. None of our friends would be up this early, it was too early for the postman, and a repair man was due at ten, but he has a key. I know this because the last time a repair man showed up, they forgot to call us, and he walked in on three attractive women piled up asleep on the couch in camisoles and panties. So I decided to stick with my usual policy of not answering the door when I’ve been woken up, and I burrowed deeper into the covers.

The bell rang again, and Loki started to growl. I sympathized: I was starting to get seriously annoyed myself, and when the pounding began, I resigned myself to getting up and dug a robe out of the closet so that I could answer the door.

Staggering blearily down the stairs, I noticed that the sun seemed low in the sky, indeed.

I unlocked the door, not bothering to check through the spyhole. Honestly, I never bother to check, and will probably being ended up pelted with rotten fruit some day as a result.

I drifted into the kitchen to make tea while Yuri fought valiantly with the bicycles in the laundry room, eventually ending up in a tangled pile of gears.

“Er, you can move the bicycles out, I suppose.”

The bicycles were wheeled out and leaned on the kitchen table while Yuri prodded at our fusebox.

“Oh, yes. Ow!”

Lights began to flicker on and off, and I paused from my tea contemplation with avid interest.

“Ooooh.”

He emerged from the laundry room, dusting his hands.

“I turn power off now, ok?”

“Yeah.”

He charged out the door, rocketing around the side of the house and vanishing from sight. After a moment, the fridge sighed and clicked off, and he came pounding round the other side of the house and back into the laundry room, where he fell upon the fuse box like a starving hippo confronted with a bowl full of apples. Ominous crunching and ripping noises emanated from the laundry room, and I couldn’t see what was going on because he closed the door, perhaps for privacy.

I sipped idly at my orange pekoe and read a few more pages of Things Fall Apart.

“Aha!”

Silence.

He coyly emerged from the laundry room and sidled out the door to turn the power back on.

“Yes! Now I show you what I find.”

“Yes,” I said, wondering if I would be forced to get up for this.

A small pile of scorched electrical parts landed on the table, perilously close to my half mango and lime.

“You see, is burned! Here, and here, here, here, here again, and over here. I think is problem.”

“Yes, that will do it.”

“Ah.”

“Well, er, hopefully that will take care of the problem. Thank you?”

“Yes.”

And Yuri bounded forth into the morning, hopping into his golden Toyota and questing on to his next urgent maintenance task.